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Winsome Earle-Sears faces strong headwinds in her campaign to be Virginia’s next Republican governor.
She’s been outpaced in fundraising and lags in polling behind her Democratic rival, Rep. Abigail Spanberger. And the support from one voice that could narrow this race is largely absent.
President Donald Trump has yet to endorse Earle-Sears, Virginia’s current lieutenant governor. While slamming Spanberger during an event in Virginia for the U.S. Navy’s 250th anniversary over the weekend, Trump did not mention Earle-Sears, a Marine Corps veteran, at all.
Earle-Sears and Trump’s relationship turned tepid in 2022 after the lieutenant governor suggested it was time for the Republican Party to “move on” past him and declined to support his third White House bid.
“A true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage. And the voters have given us that very clear message,” Earle-Sears said at the time.
Trump then undercut Earle-Sears on Truth Social, writing that he “never felt good” about her, and that she was a “phony.”
ABC News has reached out to The White House, Earle-Sears’ campaign and the Virginia GOP for comment.
Attorney general’s race
And now, as Republicans are at high risk of losing control of Virginia’s governor’s mansion, their chief executive and others in the administration are nowhere to be found on the campaign trail for Earle-Sears.
Yet they’re not completely withdrawn from Virginia politics.
Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have joined the chorus of Republican voices calling for the resignation of Democratic attorney general candidate and former Virginia delegate Jay Jones after text messages to then-fellow Virginia delegate Carrie Coyner surfaced detailing a hypothetical situation about then-Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert getting “two bullets to the head.”
The National Review reported Jones also wished for Gilbert’s wife to “watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views.”
Coyner, a Republican, claimed in a note sent to her constituents this week and obtained by ABC that Jones meant to text someone else initially, but was OK with chatting when he realized it was her. She says once she expressed “alarm” about the messages, Jones “continued to try to justify his initial statements by phone and by text.”
Jones has apologized for the messages, telling WRIC that he “sincerely and from the bottom of my heart, want to express my remorse and my regret for what happened and what I said that language has no place in our discourse, and I am so remorseful for what happened.”
In a statement to ABC News, Coyner also alleged that in a separate phone call in 2020 during a conversation about police qualified immunity, Jones suggested that the death of a few officers might result in fewer police-inflicted killings.